Not very cuil
I don’t know why Cuil is pronounced “cool”, but I might not have to worry too much about it, considering the new search engine doesn’t work at all at the moment.
You’d think ex-Googlers would have some ideas of how to make a service scale, but today they’ve alternated between being totally unavailable and having a “we’ll be back soon” page. Not a very good launch, it seems. Sure, getting lots of traffic is good, but they can’t be getting more traffic then what they should be able to handle, and they’re still most likely far away from getting the amount of traffic Google gets on a good day.
Still, I did manage to give it a spin, and it wasn’t horrible. Instead of showing the results in a vertical list, it shows the results in a grid. Going away from the old format is a gamble, and no one has succeeded with that yet. With more than $30 million in the bank, they should have some money to spend on experimentation, though.
The name leaves something to be desired, but coming up with company names isn’t easy, I suppose…
Oh, and one other thing. If Cuil does become popular, how will it be verbed? You can Google something, but can you Cuil it? “I cuiled for it, but couldn’t find anything.”